Media monitoring is considered one of the most indispensable tools in both institutional communication and strategic decision-making. It enables tracking of content published across traditional and digital media, and is vitally accompanied by content analysis to extract indicators that help shape public policies and guide official media discourse.
In Jordan, media monitoring is gaining increasing importance, especially with the growing oversight role of the media, the expansion of the digital space, and escalating regional and surrounding challenges that require effective communication and prudent management of information and news. The concept of media monitoring refers to an organized process of gathering media data from various traditional and digital sources and analyzing it, in order to assess media coverage across different domains. This helps in understanding public opinion trends regarding coverage, detecting sensitive issues or targeted campaigns, and enabling institutions to make decisions based on accuracy and reliability.
Media monitoring mechanisms in Jordan are characterized by a mix of traditional and digital methods: manual monitoring and automated software‑based monitoring. These are used to analyze and determine the tone of discourse (positive, negative, neutral), or to track shifts in public sentiment toward a particular issue or entity—especially during crises or for forecasting.
What motivated me to write on this vital topic is my deep awareness that media monitoring in our beloved Kingdom faces challenges that must be addressed and transformed into opportunities. Among the most prominent are the lack of professional analytical expertise in media analysis, the overflow of media topics, and the difficulty in tracking them. Properly developed and maintained media monitoring in Jordan would unquestionably form a strong lever to enhance and develop media governance, support decision‑makers, and serve as a leading pillar in achieving effective communication with the public.
It is now a demonstrated truth—especially with the evolution of artificial intelligence and digital analysis tools—that transitioning to advanced monitoring mechanisms such as Meltwater, Talkwalker, and qualitative text‑analysis tools like NVivo or MAXQDA, which track content from news channels, radio broadcasts, press reports, and conduct qualitative text analysis—such as discourse analysis, recurring topics, and public opinion trends—is an urgent necessity to keep pace with media transformations and safeguard national interests amid a constantly changing media landscape.
